Smoke, blood, chaos: Passengers call 911 after train crash

CAYCE, S.C. (AP) -- Passengers on a train that slammed into
an empty freight train over the weekend in South Carolina, killing two Amtrak
employees, described a smoky, bloody scene in 911 calls released to the news
media.

"There's babies with their heads busted wide open,
bleeding," one woman said to a dispatcher in a call released Tuesday to
local news outlets. "Everybody flew to the front of the train. ...
Everything is everywhere."

In another call, a man described seeing smoke inside the
cars and "a lot of people hurt." An Amtrak employee asks dispatchers
to send "plenty of help" for the injured.

In interviews with the Associated Press, passengers have
described seats ripped from their rows and luggage strewn about the passenger
compartments after the crash early Sunday morning near Cayce, South
Carolina. The conductor and engineer aboard the New York-to-Miami Amtrak train
were killed when that craft collided with a CSX Corp. freight train parked on a
side track. More than 100 passengers were treated at hospitals for injuries.

"We're on the train, but some of us have chest pains,"
another man told a dispatcher. "We need some help. ... I've got to sit
down, I can't breathe."

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board
said Monday that railway signals were out at the time of the crash while crews
installed a safety system that could have prevented the exact type of wreck
that killed engineer Michael Kempf and conductor Michael Cella.

Automated signals that could have warned the passenger train
to stop before reaching the switch sending it down the side track were turned
off as workers installed a GPS-based system called positive train control, or
PTC, NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said.

A day before, Sumwalt told reporters "an operational
PTC is designed to prevent this type of incident."

Federal investigators also said a locked manual switch
forced the passenger train onto the side track where the empty freight train
was parked after having offloaded its cargo nearby.

The crew who parked the CSX freight train on the side track
and left the padlocked switch in position to divert trains from the main line
were interviewed Monday, along with the dispatcher keeping up with trains in
the area as the signals weren't working, Sumwalt said.

Sumwalt told reporters he had not been briefed about what
the CSX workers said.

The Amtrak engineer sounded his horn seven seconds before
the crash and applied emergency brakes three seconds before the train collided
with the other locomotive at 50 mph, Sumwalt said, citing information
from the passenger train's data recorder.

Amtrak has dealt with a number of problems over the past two
months. On Tuesday, two cars separated from the company's Acela Express train
in Maryland. No one was hurt.

Less than a week ago, a chartered Amtrak train carrying
Republican members of Congress crashed into a garbage truck at a rural Virginia
crossing, killing one person in the truck, and in December, three people were
killed and dozens of others were hurt when an Amtrak train derailed as it made
its inaugural run along a new 15-mile bypass route in Washington
state. Investigators say the train was going twice the speed limit for a curve.

Kempf, the engineer killed in the South Carolina crash, had
visited a counselor to help him cope after being rattled in a previous wreck
less than a year before, his mother said.

Michael Kempf's train hit a vehicle at a rail crossing in
the first crash, Catherine Kempf, 86, said in a telephone interview Monday from
the Savannah, Georgia, home she shared with her son and his wife.

Catherine Kempf said she didn't remember specifics about the
collision on her son's normal route in the Carolinas, but she said the wreck
left him upset because he knew "he had people's lives in his hands,"
she told the Associated Press.

Kempf and conductor Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Florida, were
killed early Sunday in the third fatal Amtrak train crash in less than two
months.

Cella's wife, Christine, declined to talk to AP about
the man who had been her partner for about 20 years. On Tuesday, attorney
Howard Spier said he had been retained to represent Cella's family, calling the
10-year Amtrak employee "a loving father" who spent many nights on
the railroad, away from his wife and two small children.___